Wednesday, January 23, 2002 6:10:07 PM
The names have been changed to protect gl'innocenti.
The first house that I really remember was on Carver Street in the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh. 33 Carver Street to be exact. Carver is a tributary to the great Italian American River, Larimer Avenue. I need only say, Kingsley House, Meadow Grill, Red Eagle, Italian Pastry, Sparky's Texaco, to bring memory and drool to my relatives and a dwindling group of old timers.
When Dennis Farina proclaims in the move Striking Distance, "I'm only a Larimer Avenue dago." My family cheered!
The house still stands, and in truth, doesn't look much different now than it did then, but you will no longer find my grandmother, stern woman in black with her white hair pulled back sharply on her head, inhabiting the second floor. Nor will you see and my brother and I stuffed up in the back window of our two door coupe as my mother drove us off to go shopping upstreet.
Upstreet was East Liberty and it was a pretty vibrant place in those days. Somewhere along the line urban planning intervened and this radiant city area was cut off completely. An island created, that left to its own devices, folded in on itself. Even though it has been opened to traffic again, it is still hard to enter and leave and is mostly bypassed. There were five movie theaters. I can name them. The Liberty, The Camerphone, The Sheridan Square, The Enright and The Regent. I spent summer days gnawing popcorn from the balconies, watching Errol Flynn, Don Ameche, John Payne, Robert Taylor, Tarzan in all his guises, Randolph Scott, John Wayne and numerous others save the free world and the western intellectual position.
I traveled upstreet with my group of Carver Street urchins. We were all within a year's age of each other. We all attended Dillworth School. We would make the sign of the cross when we passed Divine Providence. We all took catechism at Help A Christian Church. I can remember the unwashed smell of brown clothed monks as the passed us in the street. Some secret Holy Odor, no doubt.
On the way to school we traversed the Meadow Street Bridge. One of the older guys grabbed Charles' arms and hung him over the side of the bridge, his feet dangling over Negley Run far enough below that he would not survive the fall. It was great fun, and perhaps the reason that I have an unreasonable fear of heights.
For adventures, we would visit the haunted house. When we threw rocks and awakened Casper and his brood, we would run screaming down the hill, cross Negley Run and climb up the million or so steps to the safety of our neighborhood.
My father bought home a box turtle, which I let, roam in the slim strip of concrete that we called the side yard. My friends convinced themselves that it was a snapping turtle. And that snapping turtles could bite you fingers off, if they grabbed you, not to mention the horror of losing your nose. One afternoon I came out to the side yard and someone had smashed the turtle with a large rock. Ignorance. I sigh now, I cried then.
We returned from a movie trip to the Sheridan Square where we had all seen The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms. The dinosaur on the very screen before us had bitten a guy right in half. We sat in T's backyard which was damp from the rain and discussed the ramifications of large reptilian creatures devouring their way from Penn Avenue, squashing The Original Hot Dog and the Flamingo (a roller skating rink). As the creature approached we got more and more spooked. Then someone thought about fossil evidence that these Thunder Lizards had roamed Carver Street, munching second and third generation Italians as they stalked. And T showed us a wet leaf that was stuck to the concrete pad of his porch. Carefully he lifted the leaf and as he did the unmistakable outline of none other than old T-Rex was revealed. We took one thoughtful long communal look at the wet green imagined pattern and ran in terrified disarray from the yard. I am not sure that I ever returned.